Rand Paul's annual Festivus rant calls out Pelosi, Giuliani and 'Neocon Apprentice' John Bolton

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., took to Twitter on Monday morning to engage in his seventh annual Airing of Grievances, a reference to a famous 1997 episode of the classic sitcom “Seinfeld,” promising at the end that there would be more to come later in the day.

“Good morning and Happy Festivus!  Today there will be many, many grievances aired, almost all in good fun,” Paul said at the beginning of his tweet thread. He began by tackling the impeachment of President Donald Trump, tweeting that his readers should “take Nancy Pelosi (please). I don’t know if I can stop laughing long enough to air my grievances with Nancy. Her new plan is great — she is going to punish the president by NOT sending his impeachment to Senate?  Next, maybe she’ll threaten to NOT send us anymore legislation?”

After joking that “it’s going to be really hard to live with myself if I don’t get to sit in a chair all day long for weeks at a time listening to people talk about Rudy Giuliani” and that House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., would have wiretapped him if he had talked to Giuliani, Paul tweeted, “You do have to wonder how he was the best the President could think of for a lawyer — ‘hey, get me that guy who spills his guts on CNN and butt dials everyone in Washington. He can keep a secret!’”

Paul then turned his sights on former national security adviser John Bolton, describing him as “what's his name, the guy who kept trying to start all the wars but then got fired on twitter.” He commented that Bolton was one of many “hawks the President hired, didn’t listen to, got mad at and fired. Neocon Apprentice really wasn’t very well thought out.” Paul praised Trump’s foreign policy instincts as “pretty good,” thought that the president would describe them as “perfect” and joked that “President Trump grades phone calls the way he scores his golf game, believe me a few mulligans are taken.”

After that, Paul continued his Festivus tradition of denouncing spending that he considered wasteful. His targets for 2019 included $466,991 to study frog mating calls in Panama, $33.9 million to buy textbooks for students in Afghanistan, $1.2 million to study the habits of online dating-app users and $22 million to bring Serbian cheese up to international standards.

During his Festivus rant last year, Sen. Paul also praised Trump’s foreign policy as being less warlike than the supposed wishes of the American foreign policy establishment. He also criticized what he deemed to be wasteful spending such as a study on the effects of cocaine on the sexual habits of quails, supplements to support Egyptian tourism, a study on daydreaming and a study on the effects of leaf blowers on lizards. He also criticized Jared Kushner as looking like “the kid from the Omen movie all grown up” and Sen. Lindsey Graham as being an Emperor Palpatine-esque figure, remarking, “I haven’t seen a Senator who loves war this much since the Star Wars Prequels.” He also criticized John Bolton back then too, tweeting: “let’s talk about John Bolton. I don’t have a grievance. I just really would have liked to have been in the room when the POTUS told him to END a war. How many times do you think he made the President repeat it because he didn’t even know what the words meant?”

Matthew Rozsa is a breaking news writer for Salon. He holds an MA in History from Rutgers University-Newark and is ABD in his PhD program in History at Lehigh University. His work has appeared in Mic, Quartz and MSNBC.